There is a large explosion across the street. A monstrous cloud billows over the neighborhood like an angry beast. There is fire everywhere, people spilled into the streets with expressions of shock and awe on their faces. Fire trucks arrive, but the fire arched over and licks another section across the street. You can see how powerless the firemen are against the hellish wave that gobbles every solid structure in its way. Such a gross dosage of hyper-reality, and from a distance you are looking at the whole spectacle with the heat vibrating against your face and body. There is screaming and wailing, and it is through them that you know some twenty families are trapped and are probably charred in the inner portion of the neighborhood. Because of the shouting, you also know there is fighting among people and cops and firemen and government officials. Everybody is here, except one: the media. The day after, you switch on the radio to wait for the news program. But, no, there was no news of the fire. You turn on the TV, but no mention of it. The papers say the day before was thoroughly lackluster. Will you be disoriented? Will you for a few seconds doubt your grasp at reality? Will you think you were just dreaming the day before?
I pose these questions to my students in a class called postmodernism. A cultural theory asserts that in this day and age, there seems to be an aberration of the old concepts of truth. Reality is not what you can touch or see for yourself. The people’s grasp at reality lies at the mercy of an intermediary or the media. The copy, or “simulacra,” is what is real.
A friend of mine who was backing a candidate in his barangay in a southern town in the last election had a hard time convincing his neighbors about a certain issue. His neighbors, otherwise trusting in ordinary times, would rather believe in what a radio commentator, whom they hardly even knew personally, would say. They didn’t trust what their own neighbor was telling them.
I must have pointed this out in a column earlier during the campaign period. The old notions of machinery—where local candidates carry national contenders—have become passé. The battle is no longer fought on the ground. The skirmish takes place mid-air. Media’s power grows, not relying on reach alone, but because it has become the intermediary that practically defines and narrates what is supposed to be real in a postmodern society. As I narrated earlier, a fire that you saw with your own eyes wouldn’t be as real as when it is being narrated by media. If it didn’t come out in the news, you would have doubted for a moment whether the fire actually took place. The theory describes this as the “loss of the real.”
Villar stood a fighting chance when he bombarded the airwaves with his political ads until Aquino leveled up in both news content and advertising when the official campaign period started. The dominant message in the end put Villar in a bad light. Teodoro insisted on basking on the old notion of machinery, relying on the campaign of local candidates and didn’t invest much on media. He was practically thin air, and ran like a goat. If you believed in the surveys and closely watched it, you’d have seen that the ticks in the figures were triggered solely by what was happening on the airwaves, not by the dynamics of traditional machinery on the ground.
However, the shifting notions of “machinery” are not only brought about by this expanding role of the media, but by the change in the dynamics of power since the local government code. But let’s take that up some other time.
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